Colour tattoo on a woman's upper back showing a red feather turning into butterflies above a seated child drawn in outline with red and orange wash.

Feather, butterflies and a child on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A red and orange feather rises diagonally across the upper back and dissolves into small butterflies that drift towards the shoulder. Below, a child sits with head bowed, drawn in black outline with soft orange and red shading, with small sparkle marks and a few clover-like shapes nearby. The soft, painterly colour fades at the edges against plain skin, and the design is framed by the shoulder blade.

Back Feather Butterfly Child Sparkle Clover

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The feather was the last thing your grandmother had kept from the cabin, and by the third lock you had already decided to lose it. Your father wanted the brass lamp and the copper kettle sold at Newbury, the stove given to the lock-keeper's wife, everything weighed and written down in the logbook. You wanted one thing that had not been counted. So you slid the quill into your coat pocket and felt it there all the way up the towpath, its vane warm from your hand.

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Your brother Danny would not stop crying that morning. He sat on the cabin step with his chin on his knees and drew in the wet clay with a bent nail, circles and loops and little four-leaf shapes he said were for luck. You knelt beside him and told him the feather could carry a letter to Grandma wherever she had gone. He did not believe you. You did not quite believe it either, but you took the quill out and laid it across the clay, and the sun came through the willows so that the vane glowed like a coal.

Afterwards, when the barge was tied up below the mill and the lamp was gone, you wrote the letter on the back of a chandler's bill with the nib dipped in cold tea. You wrote that the lock gates were stiff and the swans had come back early. You wrote Danny's name at the bottom in capitals, the way she had taught you. Then you folded it small and tucked it inside the hollow of the quill.

In the morning the feather was gone from the cabin roof, and a cloud of small copper butterflies was working its way up over the hedge towards the road. You watched them until you could not tell them apart from the dust. Danny had stopped crying. He was already halfway up the bank, following them, and you let him go first.